Torture is more preferable to iTunes...

I recently got a new laptop, and installed iTunes on it. However, I can't sync my iPhone without iTunes wiping it of all the songs I have on there. Is there a way to get all the songs off the iPhone onto iTunes so I can sync it and put all the music back on it?

I know sometimes when I delete a song from my iTunes library, next time I sync, it lets me know that there are songs on my iPod not in my library and offers to add them to my library, so it is theoretically possible to transfer songs from your iPod/iPhone to the iTunes library.

There is an option in iTunes saying "manually sync my library" or something very similar, this will prevent your iWhatever getting synced with an empty library.Yes, I'd lost my 30GB+ music library countless times before finding this...

Also open Total Commander, set "show hidden files" and you'll find all your stuff on your iPod/iPhone and you can just copy it back when you lose it. Each file has some coded name, so you don't know which is which, though the tags remain fine so all artwork and stuff stay the same once you copy the files back.

Yeah, it is not too hard, you don't need any specialized programs just windows explorer.

Just make sure you go to the itunes preferences first and tell it not to automatically sync.

Then explore your ipod and turn on hidden files. I found my files in a folder like ipod control/music. This is full of a bunch of folders like F##. These are full of music files. Just copy those files into My Computer/music/itunes/automatically add to itunes or something like that.

I just had to do this for the 2nd time, I'll have to think about a better system for backing up my stuff.

Managed to make an almighty screw-up somewhere along the line, so I synced and got rid of all the songs on my iPhone, then transferred all of the songs off the family computer (which I previously used) onto my laptop's iTunes library so I can put them all back on.

Possibly the method with the most hassle, but everything should be sorted now.